Silhouette

by Robin Hale

  I was no hero. I’d never wanted to be.

  And the Roscoe vaults would not rob themselves.

  7

  MOLLY

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry!” I babbled as I slid into the chair across from Jade at the Roasted Bean. “I got hung up on these auditing panels for Kevin and I just lost track of time.”

  Jade lifted an amused gaze from her espresso. “Moll, if I showed up somewhere expecting you to be on time after the decades of our friendship, wouldn’t you be worried about me?”

  “You’re so mean to me,” I laughed and waved at the barista.

  “I already paid for yours. Even though I’m so mean,” Jade teased, tracing a manicured finger around the rim of her mug.

  “Mean? Who said that?” I asked brightly. “I’ll fight them.”

  Jade rolled her eyes fondly and took a sip of her drink. Her warm brown eyes twinkled in the incandescent light of the cafe and she looked just precisely like she belonged in the room. If someone were painting the scene, they couldn’t have done better than the sleek, feminine shape of Jade Jones dressed in clothing so on-trend I couldn’t even imagine where she must have been shopping.

  The barista, a cute blonde with a spray of freckles across her nose and a distinctly wandering eye whenever Jade came into the shop, dropped my so-dark-it-was-practically-char drip coffee in front of me, nodding at my thanks.

  “So, catch me up. Seems like you’ve been having an exciting time lately,” Jade said wryly. “You know, if Captain Colossal doesn’t cut it out, I’m going to have words with him about how often you end up in the thick of things. He knows you’re not the front-lines type, right?”

  “Well, can’t really blame him for getting confused, what with my imposing physical presence and all of that fighting I do so competently.” I indulged in a self-deprecating wince at Jade’s concern.

  “It’s a natural mistake,” she agreed. The twinkle in her eye dimmed. “But seriously, Moll. I’ve been hanging around the crime guys. You know, when they don’t chase me out of their corner of the newsroom like I’m going to give them cooties,” Jade said with an edge of derision. “And I’ve been hearing things about the frequency with which you end up with some jerk pointing a gun or knife or supernatural lava-spewing housecat at you. I’ve got concerns.”

  I sighed and settled against the comfortable chair back. “Look, it isn’t that bad. I mean, at the university the Silhouette didn’t even have a weapon on her. There wasn’t any real danger, so you don’t need to worry about me!”

  “At the — Silho — Molly Darwinia Fawn do you mean to tell me that you were taken captive by the Silhouette in that nonsense at the university?” Jade’s eyes were so wide they were nearly perfect circles. “Why were you even at the — oh my god, was that the day you were guest lecturing?”

  Oops.

  “You, ah, you didn’t know about that, I take it.” I sipped my coffee like I could hide in it even as my best friend, the intrepid reporter, stared me down across the table.

  “No, Moll, I can’t say as I knew about that.” Jade’s voice was so dry that I needed another drink. “None of the crime section guys were talking about you being there. I guess the Captain kept you out of that one?” She regarded me with a fond, exasperated smile, and I tried not to squirm under the stare. “I’d been talking about all of the other times you’ve been in the thick of things.”

  “Are you going on another stakeout for the piece on the Senator?” I asked, desperately trying to change the subject.

  “That’s not going to work on me, Moll.” Jade glared. “And yes, I am.”

  “Make sure you bring something with actual protein in it this time, will you?” I teased. “You always bring nothing but empty carbs and you end up with a headache three hours in.”

  “That was one time!” Jade protested with a roll of her elegantly winged eyes. “And thanks, mom, I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “Ugh, speaking of, I think the worst part of the mess at the university was getting a phone call from my mother in the middle of it,” I groaned.

  “Oh god, Moll, why would you answer it?” Jade’s eyes went all pinched and sympathetic. I must have complained about my mother too often over the years.

  “The Captain told me to. Said he could handle the situation on his own and that I should stop dodging her calls.”

  “So much for loyalty,” Jade muttered mutinously.

  “Yes, well, mostly she just wanted to talk about Jenna and why she never sees her around anymore.”

  “Yikes. What’s it been, a year and a half?” Jade mused.

  “Close to that,” I muttered morosely. I stared down at my coffee, fixed just the way I liked, and tried not to let it matter.

  “Are you sure this is where you wanted to meet?” Jade asked, and I quirked a confused brow at her. “There’s a solid dive bar three doors down from here.”

  I laughed as comprehension dawned. “Thanks for the offer. But I think I’ve done enough drinking over Jenna.”

  Jade was not one to be thwarted. “That’s all right, we can count it as drinking over your mom.”

  “No, it’s — it’s fine. You know she started in on Kevin right after Jenna,” I said with a self-effacing grimace.

  “Oh, well, as long as she’s not particular.” Jade huffed. A heartbeat later, Jade’s shrewd brown eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Why were you doing his auditing panels anyway?”

  I carefully avoided Jade’s gaze and shrugged. “He asked.”

  “Molly.” The reproach in her voice was undeniable and also entirely deserved.

  My shoulders rolled as I cringed into myself. “I know, I know. I can’t help it.” The sounds of the cafe filtered in around us as I fought to find the words. “He’s just…pretty,” I finished pathetically. It didn’t at all cover the magnetism that Kevin, that the Captain exuded. “And evidently I don’t say no to pretty people.” I laughed, a little humorless, a lot self-deprecating.

  “I just don’t want to see you get hurt, that’s all. You know. Just...if Kevin turns out to be as much of an asshole as Jenna was.” Jade’s voice was gentle, even as her words weren’t particularly.

  I was drowning in the silence, entirely at a loss for something to say that didn’t require berating myself for my romantic failures, admitting my unfortunate — and growing — fixation on the local master thief, or worrying Jade even more over the way Opal City’s underbelly evidently had it out for me. The sound of the cafe was too quiet, even with the chorus of espresso machines, the coffee beans grinding, and the fragmented conversations around us. I could feel the weight of expectation pressing in on me and I was never more thankful for Jade’s friendship than when she eased it.

  “You know those guys who broke into the university? They’d never worked together before,” Jade remarked, as though it had flowed naturally from the rest of our conversation.

  “Is that unusual?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Yeah, a job like that — even a smash and grab — coordinated with the kind of firepower they were packing? That’s not really a ‘first time’ job.” Jade scooted forward on her seat, twirling a fingertip around a long, graceful earring. That had been one of Jade’s ‘I’m interested’ signals since we were children. How long were they going to keep her out of the criminal reporting circuit? “They did, however, all spend time in Vernal Ward not too long ago. Some of them were even still on probation.”

  “Does that explain it, then? That they were all in prison together and planned it there?” I took another sip of my coffee and furrowed my brow. That didn’t sit quite right. It didn’t fit all of the facts I had at hand. “Of course, the Silhouette wouldn’t have been in Vernal Ward. She’s never been so much as arrested, let alone convicted and sentenced.”

  “To be honest, she doesn’t fit the rest of the pattern at all.” Jade’s lips twisted into a contemplative frown, and her eyes went glassy like she was seeing her notes, rather than the room around us.

  “Is one
crime a pattern?”

  “Oh, no, it isn’t just one!” Jade insisted. “No, there are overlapping periods of time where these guys — the guys who broke in — were in Vernal. They weren’t all there at once, so they couldn’t have planned it there. At least, not without someone coordinating on the outside. Which, to be fair, might have happened. Communication security in Vernal has never been what anyone would call tight, yeah?”

  “Right, I remember last fall that some of the old guard were getting messages out to the next wave of enhanceds.” I frowned. “But why do you think that means this isn’t the only one? I’ve got — well, Kevin said it looked like something out of Dangerous Brains — a board up in my office trying to track their movements, and this is the only crime that more than one of that crew has been involved in.”

  “Right, but you noticed that the other things, the other vandalisms, thefts, the usual low level crime — they were all committed by more than one person. And the other people involved? All the ones we have identified spent time in Vernal in that same overlapping pattern.” Jade’s voice had taken on the quality it had when we’d binge-watched an old supernatural mystery series. She had the hands waving through the air, the husky note of ‘Follow me on this’, the gleam in her eyes that were all of the earmarks of truly bonkers fan theories.

  “Have you —” I huffed a startled laugh. “Have you started following Opal City’s crime as a fandom?”

  Jade’s dark cheeks went darker still, and I couldn’t suppress the wave of giggles that overtook me. My shoulders shook as I leaned forward, eyes tearing up under the assault. Oh hell, but she was a marvel. I hiccuped, tried to suck in all the breath I was helplessly laughing out, and managed a single snort before Jade started laughing as well.

  “It’s just that there’s — no good television anymore!” She gasped between howls of laughter. “I have to — I have to make my own fun.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re concocting fan theories about their romantic lives, too?” My eyes were blurry with unshed tears of laughter as I teased my oldest friend. “Who was it you insisted should be banging? Martin and — Storey, was it?”

  “Oh, don’t try to tell me they weren’t.” Jade scoffed. “They had chemistry for days, Moll. Days.” Brown eyes took on a wicked gleam and she cocked her head at me. “And don’t laugh. Even money says that Captain Colossal has eyes for that pretty little lab tech he keeps rescuing in all of these missions. Maybe that’s why he lets you get captured so often. Wants a reason to swoop in for some thrilling heroics.”

  I groaned and buried my face in my hands. Jade didn’t know — of course she didn’t know — that Kevin and Colossal were one and the same. She had theories that she’d shared with alarming regularity over the years, but she’d been surprisingly gentle with my need to keep his secret identity a secret.

  If she’d known, she wouldn’t have said it. She wouldn’t have pushed on that soft spot again, I was sure.

  But there was no point to indulging the joke. It would only get my hopes up, would only make things much worse than they already were. Not even my most hopeful, hopeless romanticism could convince me that it was anything other than a bad idea.

  I swallowed a too-hot sip of my coffee and tried to pretend that the flush on my face was due to the thought of the Captain’s strong arms — and not a painted smirk in the dark.

  8

  LANA

  The Shady Dame represented the sneering success that I would never get over.

  Laughter rose in boisterous shouts around the room, dark and dirty and just a little threatening, for all that it was unlikely that the violence would actually spill over into action. There was music in the background, some idiotic sporting event on one of the many screens, and the unmistakable sound of billiard balls striking against one another as players took their shots. It was good chaos. ‘Comfortable squalor,’ Izzy had called it.

  I snorted. Squalor seemed a tad dramatic, even for me. The building wasn’t falling down, the walls weren’t peeling, the floors were polished. All of the toilets worked and the plumbing didn’t leak at all. Aside from a scar in the wall where the Gravedigger’s brat had thrown a tantrum — and a full pint — it was perfectly functional. It just looked like what it was. A dive bar. The best damn dive bar in Opal City. And if I could have gone back and found the version of myself who had lifted her first wallet, heart thumping in her throat and adrenaline sending her running a full mile further than she had intended, and told her that someday she would own the Dame and it would be successful, that it would be enough that she’d never be cold or hungry if she didn’t want to be…well, she would’ve believed it, but she wouldn’t have been able to conceive of the full road to get there. Not yet.

  I scribbled another line of notes in the little book on the table in front of me, leather binding slipping in the condensation from my beer. The plan was coming together, and honestly I probably should’ve picked something more complicated…but there was enough riding on getting the next one right that I didn’t want to show off.

  Not too much, anyway.

  “So what is it, Lana? Animal or mineral?” Isobel Verdera — Izzy to me and probably me alone — slid into the open seat across the table from me, dressed entirely incongruously with her surroundings. She was in cream silk, a well-cut blouse and such ostentatiously simple palazzo pants that anyone else would have looked like an idiot in, but she could pull off.

  “Come again?” I asked, cocking my head to the side.

  “You only get that look on your face when you’re hung up on something. And the only things you get hung up on are absurdly expensive gemstones and absurdly ill-considered women. So, animal or mineral?” Izzy’s flat drawl was ruined by the bright smile that lit up her face. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that her generally effusive optimism was the bit that ruined her impression of me. She’d spend a ridiculous amount of time denying it and trying to convince me that I wasn’t nearly so dour and pessimistic as all that.

  In other words, the same argument we’d been having since we were teenagers.

  “A little bit of both, I think,” I admitted, turning the notebook around so Izzy could read my shorthand.

  She frowned down at the page. “You’re hitting a bank?” She asked quietly. I looked around the room regardless, making sure that no one was close enough to hear her quiet question.

  “There’s an interesting pearl in a strong box there.” I shrugged. “I don’t have very many pearls.”

  Izzy raised an amused brow, probably thinking of all of the pearls that had found their way into her high-end consignment shop, passing from my tainted hands through her relatively cleaner ones onto their final homes in someone else’s jewel box. “And the animal?”

  “Uses this bank.”

  There was a beat, a moment of dead silence, and then Izzy tipped her head back and let out a peal of laughter so sincere that it drew the attention of half the occupants of the bar. That kind of amusement, not tinged with something dark, was unusual in the Dame to say the least.

  “I don’t know why anything surprises me anymore when it comes to you.” Izzy snaked her hand across the table and grabbed my beer, taking a long pull that ended in a grimace.

  “Why do you do that when you know you don’t like the taste?” The exasperated irritation in my voice was entirely feigned, and I was sure that she knew it.

  “Hope springs eternal,” Izzy said breezily and waved to the bartender. It wasn’t that sort of place. There were no waiters, no table service. But Izzy wasn’t just any customer, she was the boss’s best friend, and the bartender on duty was exactly the type Izzy usually pulled. That combination meant a glass of the chilled white wine kept in a refrigerator behind the bar, just for Izzy, made its way to the table with a quickness.

  “Don’t ruin my bartender, Izz,” I grumbled. “I only just found this one and I want to keep her.”

  “I don’t ruin anyone, Lana Blake. I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.” Izzy�
��s pretty eyes were wide and blinking, but the doe-eyed thing had never worked on me. At least, not when she did it.

  A flash of Dr. Fawn — bound and blushing in that office, blinking in the darkness as she asked me to turn on the light — practically erupted in my mind. There were a pair of doe eyes that worked perfectly well on me, apparently.

  “See, you just did it again.” Izzy jabbed a tastefully manicured finger over the rim of her wine glass in my direction. “You made that face. That ‘I’m hung up’ face. Who on earth has you so distracted, Lana?” There was a tease in her voice, a smile with an edge of excitement in it that had nothing to do with the score I was planning.

  I took a long pull of my beer, stalling for time I wouldn’t actually be able to find in the glass, and sighed. I didn’t know why I resisted. She always got these things out of me eventually. “You know that job I was pulling at the university?” I asked, carefully avoiding Izzy’s eyes.

  “Yes?”

  “Well, the office wasn’t empty. It was supposed to be, but it wasn’t.” Condensation trailed after my fingers as I traced nonsensical patterns on the tabletop.

  “So you’re hung up on Professor Robinson?” I could hear the frown in Izzy’s voice even though I wasn’t looking at her.

  I barked a startled laugh. “No. No, nothing like that. There’d been a guest lecturer and she was using Robinson’s office.”

  “That’s more like it. So, what’s her name?”

  “Dr. Molly Fawn.” I paused, uncertain if the name would mean anything to Izzy. She had connections in the strangest places. For all I knew, she would’ve attended a party with Dr. Fawn the month prior. If Fawn were particularly prone to attending parties, that was.

  “Mm, I don’t recognize the name.”

  “She’s on the staff at the Opal City Research Laboratory.” I paused again, waiting for the pin to drop. It didn’t take long, Isobel Verdera was nothing if not quick on her feet.